Vigilante Squad (released as Vigilante Diaries in the US) is told as a series of non-sequential episodes that revolve around a man known only as The Vigilante (Paul Sloan). He's an ex-mercenary turned crimefighter, and at the start of the film he's in the clutches of the Armenian mob. The first half of the movie is about his friends trying to stage a rescue. The back half follows The Vigilante as he tries to get back at the mob boss that has it out for him. Along the way, he uncovers a much bigger, more dangerous plot that he and his mercenary friends must stop.
This is a movie that clearly believes in its own coolness. The belief is hardly justified, however. The movie really struggles to tell a coherent story, its episodic structure an apparent consequence of a general inability to fill out a plot. And so the film starts and stops over and over, moving from one ineffective set piece after another. It keeps introducing new characters and new wrinkles to the plot, never really stopping long enough to make any of it matter.
The structure is really clunky. For one thing, it doesn't really give enough focus to any single character. For the first half of the movie, the ostensible protagonist is tied up and unable to really do anything. We get to know an entire team of mercenaries with colorful names that won't really factor into what happens in the rest of the movie. The back half of the film finally puts the hero front and center, but it's far too late by that point. It just feels like the movie is starting over, pretty much squandering everything that came before.
Action films get a lot of leeway for clunky plotting, but even under those reduced standards this film is pretty bad. A lot of it is predicated on the bad guys not killing The Vigilante when they have the opportunity. There are several points in this film where the villains have the heroes dead to rights, and they just choose not to do anything. The film isn't really able to justify these choices, and it makes the villains feel really incompetent and ineffectual. And that makes this whole story really boring. A hero is only as good as his villains, and The Vigilante is only really staying alive because his adversaries are too dumb to really do him harm.
The action scenes aren't really any good. The film mainly features gunfights that are difficult to follow. The camera rarely conveys the geography of any given location, making the firefights feel pretty disjointed and uninteresting. Paul Sloan plays it gruff as the hero of the picture. He strikes the right pose, but offers little else. Jason Mewes lays it on thick in a supporting role, and ends up being pretty annoying. A variety actors end up in small supporting roles, no one really making an impression thanks to lackluster writing.
Vigilante Squad is a stinking pile of masculine nonsense. It’s a bunch of big dudes holding guns and talking tough, and occasionally a hot girl wearing very tight clothes passes by. There could be some merit to this barebones approach, but the film also just doesn’t know how to tell a story. It’s overloaded with its stupid, non-sequential structure and an excess of characters. When all is said and done, the movie is just loud, dumb, disjointed, and more than a little sexist. We can certainly do better than this.
My Rating:
